Mapping the future of public services: the role of geospatial data in creating citizen value

Valued at £6bn per year, the UK’s geospatial sector is going places. It is driven by rapidly evolving technology and the vast amounts of data it produces.

Public sector leaders recognise the transformative benefits of harnessing geospatial data. It is already being used to power many services - from cleaner energy to safer streets - and address interlocking challenges across government.

Crucially, geospatial data can provide timely solutions to those problems:

• Improved decision-making
• Enhanced collaboration and innovation
• Increased cost savings
• Better transparency and accountability

When service delivery and citizen experiences are improved by solutions built on geospatial data, trust builds - and places get better.

In this article, we speak to John Kimmance, Chief Customer Office of Ordnance Survey; Nic Granger, Chief Information and Financial Officer at North Sea Transition Authority; and Debbie Wilson, Head of Data at Ordnance Survey about geospatial data uses and best practice. We also get the views of Fawad Qureshi, Global Field CTO at Snowflake.

Together they map out the future for geospatial data; one where it will underpin a growing share of services used by UK citizens, wherever they are.

Everything, everywhere all at once

“Everything happens somewhere. If you don’t understand ‘where’, you’ll never understand why.”

It’s a neat description Snowflake Global Field CTO Fawad Qureshi uses to underline geospatial data’s role in the public sector. It already plays a leading part in shaping citizen experiences, from infrastructure planning to health & emergency response.

There is a recognition across Whitehall that geospatial technology and data are essential fuel for powering and augmenting service delivery. The Geospatial Commission - founded by the Cabinet Office in 2018 and now, as of January 2025, part of the Government Digital Service (GDS) - admitted in a sector scoping report published in October 2024 that its estimate of the sector’s value at £6bn annually may be some way short of the mark.

Sharing geospatial data seamlessly across separate areas of government could be transformational, argues Qureshi: “If we bring the ‘wheres’ together, from one department to others, we can understand correlation and causality and learn how to deliver better, higher-value services to the public.”

Crucially, attempts to improve data sharing have not stood still. As part of the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement, Ordnance Survey (OS) is instrumental in enhancing the use of geospatial data across central and local government organisations.

“Better access to geospatial data not only helps improve decision-making and service delivery, it also improves the lives of citizens nationwide,” states OS Chief Customer Officer John Kimmance. “Geospatial data has quietly become one of the most transformative tools in government operations.”

OS is working with GDS to further invest in its core data products. Kimmance says, “We understand the value geospatial data can add, especially with a spotlight on the power of technology to drive growth and overcome challenges.” Those two optimal outcomes align with core government missions to boost the UK’s economic fortunes while fixing service delivery problems.

But he warns: “While this is an exciting opportunity, we need greater collaboration between business and government leaders to improve data coverage and consistency, break down silos and mobilise skills.”

Navigating a complex data landscape

Geospatial data’s proponents believe it will become a golden thread connecting data with place or, put another way, services with citizens where people need them.

It won’t be easy, states Snowflake’s Qureshi: “There are certainly barriers. The public sector moves more slowly than the commercial sector. More regulations, more steps, more questions. An understandable need to identify how one action affects another, but legacy systems which won’t do the job. Customer data and GIS [Geographic Information System] data teams who don’t talk to each other.”

Using a term coined by Microsoft, he adds, “Spatial is not special: all data should be in one place. That’s why we talk about building complex data supply chains, bringing teams and data together so people can use it all.”

OS - part of DSIT, with one foot in the public sector and the other in the private sector - is navigating the complexities of data sharing. It currently shares its data with 6,500 public sector users directly and through 450 licensed partners.

Debbie Wilson, OS’s Head of Geospatial Data, explains: “We constantly innovate for better data products and services. Geospatial data is inherently complex and large, and it needs to be accessed and used for a growing range of purposes.

“An approach of using [comparatively] simple systems that store and exchange data for use locally within a consuming application creates data governance and data quality challenges, because organisations need access to data at different times and frequencies. This increases cost.”

Wilson adds: “We have implemented the Core Data Services Platform. It is designed to store and maintain data once and also to provide access to different users via a range of optimised services including open table or cloud-optimised data formats, and APIs.”

But key aspects of data storage and sharing are not the only barriers to realising the potentially huge value geospatial-driven services can bring.

Bridging the data and digital skills divide

Nic Granger is Chief Information and Financial Officer at the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA). It is part of the Offshore Energy Digital Strategy Group, which Granger says was founded as “the first step to uniting government bodies and industry”. A study by the group identified challenges around capacity, budgets and skills.

Granger observes: “Only one third of respondents to the survey felt prepared for emerging technologies. It’s a skills shortage we must address collectively.” To that end, a skills gap analysis is under way,” she adds.

Qureshi at Snowflake agrees the growth of geospatial technology is outpacing skills. 

He explains: “There are about 85 million SQL developers around the world according to the most recent estimates. Add to that 18 million Python devs, but only 4 million working in GIS. What they need is a common way to understand each other’s skills, which is something we want to enable: solutions which talk the natural language of data.”

Geospatial technology and data is a critical part of the NSTA’s operations. Its GIS platform gets more than 2 million hits weekly via APIs and dedicated applications. The GIS also exemplifies the advantages of harnessing geospatial tools for service delivery. 

Granger explains: “Our shift to digital GIS for offshore infrastructure data collection replaced a manual, document-heavy process. It has improved data quality, usability and self-service capabilities for users.

“Geospatial data is crucial for an integrated energy sector, supporting the goals of reducing emissions, accelerating energy transition and ensuring energy security. Government bodies also use the GIS platform for marine spatial planning in multiple sectors.”

Geospatial’s place at the heart of government

Ultimately, the proof of geospatial’s positive effect on services rests on how all users experience them - not least citizens.

Snowflake’s Qureshi believes there is a huge opportunity to use geospatial data to shape services and, in turn, build trust. “We want to collect and deploy data across the entire value chain. That creates traceability and transparency through the GDPR element of ‘right to explanation’. Anyone is able to ask a provider how it acquired, changed and used data, and to explain how they were targeted with a product or service.

“So there are extra layers of accountability, and that will naturally improve trust in services. At the same time, using geospatial data to build and manage those services adds value for the taxpayer.”

OS’s Kimmance concurs: “Geospatial data can help bridge the gap between government and citizens by making information more accessible and understandable. For instance, interactive maps and visualisations allow people to see the impact of government initiatives in their local community. It fosters transparency and trust.”

He highlights how OS supports and enhances emergency services by providing access to expertise and a range of its data. This helps to bring about quicker incident response, greater sharing of location data and effective event security planning. OS also offers a free, 24/7 Mapping for Emergencies service to the resilience community.

Such successful strategies are only increasing demand for geospatial data services, says Kimmance’s OS colleague Wilson. “More users are asking for our data to be available within external data marketplaces and platforms. There’s demand to make it easier to directly access and use the data within analytics tools and platforms.”

Expansion of geospatial services is also in the NSTA’s roadmap, reveals Granger: “We anticipate further geospatial use as our remit expands to areas like hydrogen and, potentially, geothermal energy, where understanding subsurface geology is essential.

“We plan to integrate GIS with other datasets, such as emissions data, to support energy transition goals. Additionally, expanding self-service capabilities will reduce reliance on specialists. We also intend to explore advanced tools like gen-AI and machine learning.”

Using local insights to build global solutions

Qureshi believes the sky could be the limit for geospatial data-driven applications. He cites an instance when the Met Office worked with Snowflake Marketplace to enhance weather data delivery - the result being a return of £19 on every £1 of taxpayers’ money invested.

Qureshi says: “The goal of the Met Office is to create social economic benefit for the UK. One example is if somebody in the transport sector is using weather information to understand and mitigate potential delays to services.

“We use a whole suite of observations to make predictions: satellites, radar, measuring equipment in aviation to buoys and web observing equipment on the ground. Most of the data is derived directly from the Met Office to customers.”

By making data more rapidly accessible and actionable to a wider user base via the platform, the Met Office can better support critical offerings like emergency services or public transit, driving positive outcomes for citizens and economies.

One exciting aspect of geospatial technology, comments Qureshi, is the ability it gives users to consider agile deployment, fuelling fresh insights and innovation.

The technology can be applied for local solutions but also to investigate and mitigate the biggest challenges humanity faces.

Migration is one of these, Qureshi says - not least the forced movement of people and populations displaced by conflict and natural disasters. “We must ensure migrations happen voluntarily rather than people being forced from their homeland.”

Snowflake supported a hackathon for COP28, ‘Bridging Climate Change and Human Mobility’. Hosted by the International Organization for Migration, and run in London and Nairobi, session attendees included UNHCR, UN Refugee Agency and the Global Centre for Climate Mobility.

Teams considered a wide range of climate-related factors driving migration, from harnessing data and technology to anticipate regional displacement, to the effects of socio-economic factors on different populations.

“By analysing climate change data we can identify vulnerable populations and proactively implement measures to protect them from the worst impacts of climate change,” says Qureshi. “Location data can help governments to build an early warning system to predict and help address emerging displacements.”

Delivering future services based on geospatial genius

Looking to the future, Qureshi considers other ways in which the genius of geospatial could be unlocked to contribute to government goals.

“London has a really high concentration of CCTV cameras,” he observes. “Traditionally, of course, the huge amount of data those cameras create has been used for security purposes. But what if we proactively combed through petabytes of footage taking a different perspective, and using a data platform to manage it?

“In the future we see those cameras providing more and more insights: the telemetry of the city. That could range from understanding footfall to assist with city architecture to automating all traffic signals as a kind of connected nervous system.”

Qureshi concludes, “There is so much value that can be added with geospatial technology: connecting place and people, and improving people’s lives with smarter services.”